Monday Morning Reads: Systems that Benefit the Privileged Elite
Posted: March 18, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: capitalism, CNN Rape apologia, Cyprus Bank Runs, Cyprus financial crisis, jesuits, Labor Secretary, Pope Francis, rape, Steubenville Rape Trial, Tom Perez 66 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m going to start the day’s reads off with two really good articles on modern capitalism. Both actually have titles that ask questions. I’ll start with the first one written by Richard Wolfe at The Guardian as reprinted by RS. ” What’s efficiency got do do with capitalism?” The answer is absolutely nothing.
What’s efficiency got to do with capitalism? The short answer is little or nothing. Economic and social collapses in Detroit, Cleveland and many other US cities did not happen because production was inefficient there. Efficiency problems did not cause the longer-term economic declines troubling the US and western Europe.
Capitalist corporations decided to relocate production: first, away from such cities, and now, away from those regions. It has done so to serve the priorities of their major shareholders and boards of directors. Higher profits, business growth, and market share drive those decisions. As I say, efficiency has little or nothing to do with it.
This is what we call a “positive” economic discussion on policy in that that the data leads one to the conclusion and values don’t play a role in the argument until the end of the article when the author makes a case for democratization of the economy. This is called making a “normative” case. For a “normative” economic discussion from the get-go, turn to this article in WAPO by Steven Perlstein. “Is capitalism moral?”
Note the Gordon Gekko-like logic here: Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations. And it’s not just in the movies. The same amorality was on display at those Senate hearings in 2010 where Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre and the team from Goldman Sachs tried to explain to incredulous lawmakers why it was perfectly reasonable to peddle securities to clients that they had deliberately constructed to default.
Free-market advocates have a stronger moral case against government “confiscating” the money earned by one person to give it to another.
The traditional liberal defense of redistribution, of course, is that a lot of what passes for economic success derives not only from hard work or ingenuity but also from good fortune — the good fortune to be born with the right genes and to the right parents, to grow up in the right community, to attend the right schools, to meet and be helped by the right people, or simply to be at the right place at the right time. A market system should reward virtue, they argue, not dumb luck.
The problem is that we don’t really have anything resembling textbook market capitalism because all markets don’t exhibit characteristics that make them amenable to an unrestrained market. Also, we have a political class that is easy to capture via donations and lobbying who set up laws that allow already dominant industries to become more monopolistic and less ‘free’ through preferential legal treatment and taxation. The worst of the folks that scream about the virtues of ‘capitalism’ are the ones that really know nothing about Adam Smith or the origins of the system and its simple agriculture and industrial roots. For a real life example of the failures of unchecked capitalism, check out BB’s post last night outlining what’s going on in Cyprus. The overall mismanagement of lending and under-evaluation of risk by British, American and German banks has cost the citizen’s of many countries a lot of wealth. The Cyprus situation is unprecedented and sets an especially dangerous precedent. You can see how the powerful can co-opt the system in this play that takes savings from depositors. Markets all over the world are responding. Asian markets were the first to tank.
I spent a lot of time yesterday in an absolute rage over the rape apologia rampant in coverage by two of CNN’s women journalists who seemed more concerned with the lasting impact the verdict of the trial would have on the convicted rapists than the victim and possibly more victims of their out-of-control male libidos. There was also more discussion of the role of teen alcohol abuse in the incident that the attitudes and privileged treatment of the male athletic stars by the media. It was totally disgusting!! I posted some of this down thread in the Sunday Reads but feel strong that it needs to frontpaged and repeated. The judge got the verdict right while CNN turned into a rape apologia factory.
CNN’s Candy Crowley began her breaking news report by showing Lipps handing down the sentence and telling CNN reporter Poppy Harlow that she “cannot imagine” how emotional the sentencing must have been.
Harlow explained that it had been “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”
“One of the young men, Ma’lik Richmond, as that sentence came down, he collapsed,” the CNN reporter recalled, adding that the convicted rapist told his attorney that “my life is over, no one is going to want me now.”
At that point, CNN played video of Richmond crying and hugging his lawyer in the courtroom.
“I was sitting about three feet from Ma’lik when he gave that statement,” Harlow said. “It was very difficult to watch.”
Candy then asked CNN legal contributor Paul Callan what the verdict meant for “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”
“What’s the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially?” Crowley wondered.
“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” Callan remarked. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law.”
“That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
The purpose of a justice system is to make sure those guilty of heinous crimes pay for their crimes. I’m still livid about this and so are most of the folks on my twitter stream. You can look down stream on Sunday’s thread for videos and links. I found Dan Wetzel’s post particularly compelling as it describes the entitlements given to male athletes in Steubenville and elseville.
The Big Red players were disorganized crime. No secrets. No code words. No shame. They neither grasped the depth of the crime nor the unrelenting pressure of true authority – not their compliant parents or ball coach, but a legal system that didn’t care a whit about Steubenville High football.
Steubenville’s football program has long been a source of pride in the community. (Reuters)For all the rumors and speculation around town of cover-ups and favoritism being played, the authorities did their job. There is zero indication the Steubenville police did anything but aggressively and swiftly investigate the charges.
When understandable conflicts of interest – only 18,000 people live in the city and everyone knows everyone – arose in the local prosecutors office, the case was handed over to the state’s attorney general out of Columbus. A judge was brought in from across the state, near Cincinnati. And it was Judge Lipps, not anyone around Steubenville, who granted immunity to the witnesses.
Meanwhile, attorney general Mike DeWine called on Sunday for a grand jury to continue an investigation into the case.
“This community desperately needs to have this behind them,” DeWine said. “But this community also desperately needs to know justice was done and that no stone was left unturned.”
It’s still hard to say if Mays and Richmond ever grasped the trouble they were in until Sunday.
Mays knew enough to grow concerned. The girl was never sure whether to press charges, but once her parents found out, there would be no doubt. They culled social media for clues and walked into the Steubenville Police Department with a flash drive of evidence.
Just prior to that, Mays became panicked and texted the girl.
“I’m about to get kicked off my football team,” Mays wrote.
“The more you bring up football, the more pissed I get,” the girl wrote back. “Because that’s like all you care about.”
They had no idea about the severity of what they had done which means there’s an awful lot of parents, teachers, and clergy that need to sit down with some girls and boys and define sexual assault. They also need to make sure that everyone knows that the laws apply to every one.
I know there are many ‘recovering’ Catholics that read this blog so I thought I’d link to this article in Salon by Andrew O’Hehir entitled “Is Pope Francis a Fraud?” He makes some valid points about looking at each parish or archdiocese as distinct. He focuses on the recent purge by the Jesuits of their liberal coherts and the position of the new Pope in a church in turmoil.
But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.
I can’t speak to any of those being a WASP turned WASB, but I thought I’d share it all the same since I read the article knowing the role of Popes and the church in history.
President Obama is set to nominate Tom Perez for Labor Secretary today.
Perez, 51, is the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Hilda Solis, who resigned in January.
The White House portrayed Perez as someone in line with Obama’s sense of social justice. An official lauded Perez for settling the nation’s three largest fair lending housing cases, boosting enforcement of human trafficking laws and protecting rights of veterans and students. He also led the Justice Department in challenging voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.“Tom is a dedicated public servant who has spent his career fighting to keep the American dream within reach for hardworking middle class families and those striving to get into the middle class,” the White House official said.
I’d say that’s enough of me writing things. Now, it’s your turn. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Steubenville Rape Trial Descends into the Slut-Slamming Hell Realm: Lessons in Toxic Masculinity
Posted: March 16, 2013 Filed under: Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: Ohio. Slut Slamming, rape, Steubenville Rape Trial, Toxic Masculinity 19 Comments
I’m really trying to enjoy the perfect New Orleans weather and the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities. However, it’s hard to avoid the twitter streams on two really horrible reminders of the darker side of American Life. CPAC continues to reach new bottoms every year. That, however, is not the worst thing to watch at the moment.
The Steubenville Rape Trial is currently streaming live and the Defense Closing argument is a good example of everything that is wrong with how men view rape. The defense attorney just basically said the victim threw herself at “that child” and gee, she drank a lot of vodka so probably said “yes” and forgot about it. ABC News just stated that the rape victim “made plan to meet” attacker and characterized it as “incriminating.” The defense strategy is that “date rape” doesn’t exist. So, basically all of our young women that go on dates have just automatically placed themselves in the position of saying yes to whatever their date wants. Looks like we may have to bring back chaperones if this guy’s arguments succeed.
The defense stayed quiet with its date-rape-doesn’t-exist strategy, even as many of those following the case so closely finally saw the two accused high-school football players for the first time.
“There will be challenges for everybody in this case,” Special Prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter told Judge Tom Lipps during a packed session at Jefferson County juvenile court, with a silent protest from Occupy Steubenville carrying on outside. “Holding these two responsible for what they did — that will be the easiest you will make.” Hemmeter’s opening salvo was unflinching — she named the victim as a courtroom video feed sent it around the Internet, she repeated the word “degradation,” and she spared no details about how suspects Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond “repeatedly violated” the victim (who will likely not be named by the media, as is custom with alleged victims of sexual assault).
As we reported in our in-depth trial preview earlier on Wednesday, Hemmeter and her fellow prosecutor have been silent in the press and about the investigation, even as hackers tried to piece together clues. But within the first 30 minutes of the trial picking up in earnest after an hour-long recess, Hemmeter introduced evidence beyond what a rapt nation has seen on Instagram (above) and YouTube: she submitted as evidence and projected onto the courtroom wall two naked pictures of the victim, one allegedly taken and sent from the phone of Mays, the suspect facing multiple charges. “The person ushering her [to the bathroom] was Trent Mays,” said Hemmeter, insisting that the Steubenville High quarterback was present when the alleged victim realized she was inebriated beyond control. There is also a blanket with the alleged victim’s DNA.
Hemmeter also reiterated the controversial pre-trial testimony from three Steubenville High athletes who said that the alleged victim was not conscious while being attacked. Hemmeter said, rather graphically:
You heard the testimony that in the car, Trent Mays unzipped her shorts and slipped his finger into her vagina … They [witnesses] will tell you that Trent Mays tried to put his penis in her mouth and you’ll hear that Ma’lik Richmond was down by her feet and inserted two fingers into her vagina while she lay motionless.
So it’s now finally clear that the prosecution will rely on the pre-trial testimony and on social-media evidence we haven’t yet scene, all in an effort to discount the increasingly strong — if increasingly vile — strategy from the defense for Mays and Richmond. The defense was granted a last-minute appeal on Tuesday night to subpoena three of the alleged victim’s friends who apparently made incriminating statements to police that she had made plans to meet up with Mays and that she “was completely fine” the morning after. That would seem to give the defense its own trio of star witnesses from West Virginia, testifying against their “best friend,” to counter the prosecution’s three star athletes, who appear to be doing the same.
Rape will never be treated the way it should be until men in this country learn about and rebuke “Toxic Masculinity”.
Toxic masculinity has its fingerprints all over the Steubenville case. The violence done to the victim was born out of the boys’ belief that a) sexually dominating a helpless girl’s body made them powerful and cool, and b) there would be no consequences for them because of their status as star athletes (If you want to see stomach-churning first-hand evidence of this, check out this video of one of their friends gleefully talking about how “raped” and “dead” the victim was). The defense is basing their entire case on it, arguing that this near- (and sometimes totally) unconscious girl’s body was the boys’ to use because “she didn’t affirmatively say no.” The football community’s response—by which I mean not just the coaches, school, and players, but the entire community of fans—is steeped in the assumptions of toxic masculinity, treating the athletes and the game as more important than some silly girl’s right to both bodily autonomy and justice. Steubenville residents have been quick to rally around the team, suggesting that the victim “put herself in a position to be violated” and refusing to talk to police investigating the assault. The two players who cooperated with police were suspended from the football team, while the players accused of the rape have been allowed to play. The coach even went so far as to threaten a New York Times reporter asking questions about the case. (No surprise there: When it comes to male-dominated sports, toxic masculinity is the rule, not the exception.)
But sports is hardly the only breeding ground for toxic masculinity. Witness the recent, vicious bullying of Zerlina Maxwell by fans of Fox News. Last week, Maxwell was on Hannity and dared to opine that the best rape prevention isn’t about what women can do to protect themselves, but instead focuses on raising men who don’t rape. She also personally identified herself as a survivor of rape. What followed was a nearly inconceivable onslaught of misogynist and racist attacks, including repeated threats of rape and death. All because a black woman insisted that the work of stopping rape—“women’s work” if there ever was such a thing—requires men’s labor. Under the influence of toxic masculinity, the logical response to a man being forced or even encouraged to do something coded “female” is always violence.
An expert testifying for the defense today said a teen girl reportedly raped by two Steubenville football players could have had an alcohol-induced blackout after drinking last August, but still could have made the decision to leave a party with the athletes.
However, a prosecutor said the expert had not been shown all the evidence, pointing out that the person had not seen three photos in which the girl appears to be passed out.
Kim Fromme, a professor of clinical psychology at University of Texas, who conducts research on the effects of alcohol, said her analysis shows the girl might have no memory of the night, but based on her evidence the girl was still moving, walking and talking, and could have consented to leave a party with the two defendants.
“It seems pretty clear she made a voluntary decision to leave with (the 17-year-old defendant),” Fromme said.
Much of her testimony focused on the difference between a blackout and being passed out. Fromme said the brain essentially shuts down if a person is passed out. However, a person experiencing a blackout from drinking can still function, but will have little or no memory of what they did. She said people have performed surgery or flown a plane while experiencing a blackout.
She said if the girl was doing things such as voluntarily walking unassisted down stairs, she was capable of engaging in voluntary decisions.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter showed Fromme a picture of the teen girl apparently passed out and being carried by the defendants. Fromme said she had not seen the picture. Fromme also had not seen pictures of the girl laying naked on a couch and on the floor of a basement.
Hemmeter said testimony from other witnesses that Fromme had not heard indicate the girl might have drank more than Fromme’s evidence indicated. Fromme estimated the girl’s blood-alcohol level at between .18 to .25, based on witnesses who saw the girl drinking. (Motorists in Ohio are considered under the influence of alcohol if they have an 0.08 blood-alchohol level.)
“So if she was sexually assaulted during that blackout, she wouldn’t remember, right?” Hemmeter asked.
“Yes … nor would she remember if she consented,” Fromme said.
Fromme appeared as a witness for lawyer Walter Madison, who represents the 16-year-old defendant.
It’s a damned shame that things are going down like this. I have no idea–at this point–if the young victim will see justice but I do believe that this will discourage reporting.
Monday Reads
Posted: March 11, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Etiquette in the digital age, Hunger Epidemic in America, presidential power grabs and scandals, rape, sexual assault, Steubenville Rape Trial, violence against women, Zerlina Maxwell 56 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m afraid if you’re looking for a cheery Monday morning set of reads that I am not going to fill your bill today.
I’m not sure if you’ve been following the story of Zerlina Maxwell who suggested that we consider teaching men not to rape since we’ve got so many incidences of rape in so many places here and around the world. This is a timely question given the awful Steubenville Rape Trial that is scheduled to start today in Ohio. In many ways, the videos and tales from Steubenville show that rapists are more common than the psychopathic sexual predator that many want to conjure up to gloss over the problems we with have with rampant male entitlement. Get ready for this week in rape culture and apologia. It will be coming to media near you.
With the trial scheduled to start this week and after a judge refused to change the trial location, officials are again prepping for the glare of the media spotlight to descend on the town.
In a press conference last week, DeWine told reporters that additional charges may be brought against the other teenagers after this trial concludes. He estimated the case would last between three to four days.
DeWine also met with protesters lead by Jacqueline Hillyer of the Ohio chapter of the National Organization of Women, who called for the arrest of Nodianos and the other teens involved for failing to report a crime.
“The worst thing about the crime in Steubenville and it was a crime, it was not that it was so ugly and horrible and disgusting but that it was ordinary,” Hillyer said. “It happens all the time across the state, across the country in high schools and people don’t intervene.”
Rape is all too ordinary. So, to many of us, Maxwell asks a legitimate question. She even braved Hannity–the patron saint of white male entitlement–to begin a conversation on why rape is so pervasive and how we might try telling boys that it’s not okay to rape girls instead of telling girls to be in a constant state of alert and fear. She got way more than she bargained as a result.
As Maxwell, a rape survivor herself, told Salon on Friday, “I don’t think we need to be telling a rape survivor that statistics are not on your side. That’s insensitive.” But where she drew outrage was in her suggestion to Hannity that “I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there.” She told Hannity, “You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust,” adding, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.”
The mere notion that maybe men need to be involved in the conversation about sexual violence earned Maxwell instant disdain, anger – and a lot worse. The Blaze called her remarks “bizarre” and the Washington Times reported that she’d “argued against women arming themselves.” Deeper down on the Internet, the responses got even more scathing, from bloggers who said she’d been “oversimplifying” to the Twitter trolls who told her she ought to get raped. Thanks for the feedback, Internet dopes. Why would anybody think that you need some sensitivity training?
“I knew going in I was going to get a lot of pushback,” Maxwell says. “I didn’t think I would receive rape threats. I can’t even go on my Facebook page; it’s full of people wanting to rape me. It’s too triggering. The amount of insensitivity is shocking.”
As Maxwell tells Salon, her point to Hannity was not about self-defense; it was about how we look at the big picture. “Telling every woman to get a gun is not rape prevention,” she explains. “The reality is that we need to be changing how we train and teach young men. We need to teach them to see women as human beings and respect their bodily autonomy. We need to teach them about consent and to hold themselves accountable.” And when we do, things change. After Canada launched a “Don’t be that guy” consent awareness campaign in 2011, the sexual assault rate dropped for the first time in years — by 10 percent.
There’s a basic problem with the argument that Hannity made which is essentially a similar statement made by the victim’s father in 
Steubenville. The father said
“I’ve tried to show my girl that not all men are like this, but only a despicable few,” and their mothers that ignore the truth that they gave birth to a monster”
while Hannity told Maxwell that “evil exists in the world”. I don’t think mothers give birth to monsters. I think most cultures teach men that women and children are prey and property and can be brought into control in whatever ways it takes.
One in three women will be raped in her life time. Rape is all too ordinary.
I suppose I should backstory this by letting you know that I’ve never been raped by a stranger but I sure as hell have had to fight off bosses and high school and college peers to varying degrees. I am not a rape survivor. I’m a girl who got lucky many times. I was ‘volunteered’ by a Junior League neighbor when I was a junior in high school for a rape and violence line they were establishing in Omaha. There were very few things like that at the time. It’s now a major program staffed with professionals. The program resides with the local YWCA. Back then, it was a few psychologists and concerned women. They got volunteers where they could and trained us with what little they had.
Two years of answering that phone one night a week morphed me into an advocate for changing rape laws by the time I got to university. By that time, I fully understood the threat of date and acquaintance rape. We succeeded in getting most Nebraska police departments to take officers responding to rape out of the property crimes division and asked for trained, women police officers. Sex crimes are now properly placed into the major crimes divisions. We also got the law changed so that a women married to her rapist could be legally recognized a a victim. We fought the clause that said two people had to witness the rape and testify in order for it to be ‘rape rape’. We also worked to block a woman’s previous sexual history as well as things like where she was or what she was wearing or had been eating or drinking.
Then there were changes that had to be made by the hospital and police responses to rape victims too. I remember when one of my friends got raped by a stranger on campus. She told me she thought she couldn’t report it because she’d been smoking pot before she was ambushed in the library by this criminal. She was afraid no one would take her seriously. I told her hell no and let’s call a police woman right now. But, of all the times I went to speak about rape at high schools and sororities, it became apparent to me what is apparent in the numbers. The majority of women are not raped by ski-masked, gun wielding strangers that could be taken care of with the careful aim of the right caliber of gun. I learned that was a myth of the old west about 40 years ago. I still want to strangle any one that says women make up rapes or ask for it. It’s obvious there needs to be some education out there otherwise this crap would go away instead of showing up in US Senator debates and on major news shows.
No one would ever blame a man for being the victim of a burglary or hold up. But, our rape culture gives many folks the idea that women are always at least partially to blame for the aggressive sexual behavior of men. No matter how old we get, how dowdy we dress, or how careful we are about the locks on our doors or where we park, the fear and danger is there. It’s not about our behavior, it’s about theirs.
Think about what kinds of things we teach children not to do via school. These things include not engaging in consensual sex, not stealing, not fighting, and a lot of other things. Check out these statistics on sexual assault and tell me it’s not a pervasive problem in this country. Many children–of both sexes–are not even safe in their homes, churches, or social groups. Anyway, I know that we have many rape survivors here whose stories are more compelling than anything I could write. It’s just that it’s going to be a week of watching this trial and listening to the same old canards. I’m prepackaging my hugz already because I’m aware that were going to hear rape apologia along with the facts of the case.
Anyway, if you want to see how cruel the world can be to victims of crime, here’s a look at some of Maxwell’s twitter stream via TPM. It’s awful beyond words. That she’s a rape survivor makes it more than awful beyond words.
So, here’s a few other things that you might want to read this morning that are slightly less traumatizing.
This is a compelling article on punditry and presidential scandal by Robert Parry.
A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.
There’s an amazing piece of cinema out on America’s Hunger Epidemic called ‘A Place at the Table’. It couldn’t be more timely given the impact of the sequester on basic programs like WIC. I watched it On Demand so I’m sure it’s probably there for you too if you have access to that or some other on-line movie source.
Table’s statistics are overwhelming, but they are intended to overwhelm. Whether it’s the 50 million Americans who are living in food-insecure households (which means they are struggling with hunger), or the fact that 1-out-of-2 kids in America will, at some time in their childhood, have to rely on federal assistance for food. This is happening in the richest country in the world, and the problem is only getting worse. Under President Reagan there were 20 million Americans living with food insecurity. We’re well over double that figure now.
Table’s stories will overwhelm too. Whether it’s the fifth grader who is so hungry that she envisions her teacher as a banana and her fellow students as apples, or the single mother of two who finally gets a fulltime job only to realize that she is no longer food stamp eligible, a loss of $3-per-day that puts her family into serious food insecurity. That means her kids no longer have breakfast or lunch at daycare, and her youngest is already developmentally disabled due to improper nutrition. Lest we think she’s living large off her new job, food stamp eligibility ended once her salary passed $23,000, a figure hardly sufficient to pay for rent, utilities, insurance and transport, let alone food. (Most Americans are surprised to learn that the parents of hungry children typically have fulltime jobs.) Those who think food stamps breed dependency are wrong. As a child, raised singly by my mom after my dad died early, I too depended on food stamps. For many of us, they are critical lifelines of support while we get back on our feet.
I’ve got one last suggestion for you to ponder and then I’m off to finish coffee and work with students. How do you redefine etiquette in the Digital Age?
Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says “Thank you”? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?
Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?
Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication.
So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Saturday Reads: Hillary’s Glasses, Neanderthal DNA, Violence Against Women, and Much More
Posted: January 26, 2013 Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Media, misogyny, Mitt Romney, morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: abortion, electoral college, fetus fetishists, GOP vote-rigging, Neanderthal DNA, rape, Senator Ron Johnson, violence against women 48 Comments
Good Morning!!
Every Friday, Chris Cillizza names the winner of the “Who had the worst week in Washington” award. This week’s winner was Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson for claiming that Hillary Clinton faked her emotional response to his ridiculous and annoying questions during the Senate Beghazi hearing.
So who had the best week? I’d say it was Hillary Clinton. Everyone except the most out-there wingnuts could see how brilliant she looked as she testified in Congress and made Republicans like Johnson and Rand Paul look like lightweights.
After the hearings, the media wondered why she was wearing those big glasses with the thick lenses. The Daily News explains:
Closeups of Secretary of State Clinton taken during her Senate testimony Wednesday revealed that her head injury last month left her with lingering vision problems.
As she testified about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the secretary of state appeared to have tiny vertical lines etched onto the left lens of her new brown specs.
Clinton’s spokesman confirmed Thursday night she is wearing the special glasses as a result of the fall and concussion she suffered last month, but he did not elaborate.
Experts told the Daily News that Clinton likely has a Fresnel prism placed on her glasses. The adhesive panel is used to treat double vision.“If she’s wearing a Fresnel prism, then she has double vision without it,” said Dr. Mark Fromer, medical director of Fromer Eye Centers.
At New York Magazine, Dan Amira noted the many faces of Hillary adjusting her glasses during the Benghazi hearings and added captions to suggest what Hillary might have been thinking at the time. Here a couple of them:
The “I’m So Going to Veto All of Your Bills When I’m President” Adjustment
The “Listening to You Grandstand Is Fascinating” Adjustment
I know everyone has heard about the latest Republican scheme to rig future presidential elections so Republican candidates win even if they lose the popular vote in a landslide. I’ve got a couple of useful reads for you on that effort. Josh Marshall writes about it at TPM under a photo of a nuclear mushroom cloud: This is a Big Big Deal.
The US electoral college system is based on winner take all delegate allocation in all but two states. If you get just one more vote than the other candidate you get all the electoral votes. One way to change the system is go to proportional allocation. That would still give some advantage to the overall winner. But not much. The key to the Republican plan is to do this but only in Democratic leaning swing states — not in any of the states where Republicans win. That means you take away all the advantage Dems win by winning states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so forth.
But the Republican plan goes a step further.
Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even thoughthey got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.
In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.
Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.
So now the GOP wants to go beyond making voting incredibly difficult for anyone who isn’t rich and white to making the votes of rich white people count more than anyone else’s. At The Atlantic, Molly Ball reports on her interview with a “Republican operative” who is leading the effort to “Take the Electoral-Vote-Rigging Scheme National.”
Jordan Gehrke, a D.C.-based strategist who’s worked on presidential and Senate campaigns, is teaming up with Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio Republican secretary of state, to raise money for an effort to propose similar electoral reforms in states across the country, he told me this week.
Gehrke and Blackwell have been talking to major donors and plan to send a fundraising email to grassroots conservatives early next week. The money would go toward promoting similar plans to apportion electoral votes by congressional district in states across the country, potentially even hiring lobbyists in state capitals.
Gehrke isn’t saying which states the project might initially target. He says he’d like to see the plan implemented in every state, not just the ones where clever redistricting has given Republicans an edge, and he justifies it in policy, not political terms.
A presidential voting system where the electoral college was apportioned by congressional district might not be perfectly fair, he says, but it would be better than what we have now. It would bring democracy closer to the people, force presidential candidates to address the concerns of a more varied swath of the American populace, and give more clout to rural areas that are too often ignored. And while it might help Republicans in states like Virginia, it could give Democrats a boost in states like Texas. Ideally, this new system, implemented nationally, would strengthen both parties, he claims.
Uh huh. Sure. Read the interview at the link.
Connie from Orlando sent me this link to an article about violence against women at Truthout by Rebecca Solnit of TomDispatch: A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn’t mean all men are violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic of violence by men against women, both intimate violence and stranger violence.
It’s impossible to give the gist of this article with a few excerpts, so I hope you’ll go read the whole thing. Here’s a bit more:
Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice — and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it — though a graphic has been circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. You explain to me why colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.
To continue the violence against women theme, Amanda Marcotte gives her take on the crazy proposed law in New Mexico that would jail women if they try to abort a pregnancy caused by rape because the fetus must be preserved as “evidence.”
Of course, the entire idea that having a rapist’s baby would somehow be treated as proof of a rape is beyond silly. After all, the defense against the charge of rape is rarely to claim that the penis didn’t go into the vagina, but to accuse the victim of consenting and then, due to the unique viciousness of women, claiming it was rape for the lulz. Or to conceal her epic sluttiness by having the police grill her about her sex life, the defense attorney question her about it for the public record, and the entire community gossip about what a big slut she must be to press rape charges. I suspect Brown knows this, coming from the same anti-choice circles as Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, where the belief is that women are deceitful creatures who will lie and kill to conceal how much fun sex they’re having.
To understand what’s going on here, you have to understand that anti-choicers primarily understand abortion as an attempt by women to hide how naughty they are. Never mind that most women getting abortions are in their 20s and are mothers already; the myth that abortion patients are young girls having all this sexy fun they’re not supposed to have and then hiding the “evidence” with abortion is so erotic and enticing for anti-choicers that they’re not letting it go. That’s why hanging out in front of abortion clinics and yelling at patients is so crucial to the movement: They believe you’re trying to hide your shameful non-virgin status, and by gum, they’re going to be there to make sure they get a chance to see your face and cast judgment. You will not get to hide your non-virginity from them! They are entitled to pass judgment, and if they don’t get to do it by shaming you for being a single mother, they’ll show up and yell at you at the abortion clinic. And probably masturbate about it later. You laugh, but when you see behavior like this enough, you begin to realize that this anti-choice obsession with abortion is so profound that “sexual fetish, no matter how sublimated” is the likeliest explanation.
I really think she’s right about the fetus fetishists.
Remember that story about the scientist from Harvard who wanted to find an “adventurous woman” to bear a Neanderthal child? Turns out it was just a bunch of media hooey. From the LA Times: ‘Cloned cave baby’ stories missed the mark, scientist says.
Let’s be clear: That Harvard scientist you heard about is NOT seeking an “adventurous woman” to give birth to a “cloned cave baby.”
But that was the juicy story making its way around Web on Tuesday.
The blowup began when the German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Harvard synthetic biologist George Church, who is well-known for his genome sequencing effort, the Personal Genome Project, and for all sorts of other unusual and creative projects such as encoding his new book, “Regenesis,” in actual DNA.
In his interview with Der Spiegel, Church discussed a number of ways “DNA will become the building block of the future,” as the magazine put it. The interview touched on back-engineering dinosaurs, by first identifying the mutations that separated ostriches, one of the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs, from their long-extinct forebears. It discussed the possibility of using DNA to build gadgets in the future — “cars, computers or coffee machines,” as Der Spiegel put it. Church also talked about the possibility of synthesizing genes to promote virus resistance or longevity.
As for the Neanderthal baby? It did come up — as a hypothetical. Church said that the speed at which technology was evolving might make such a project possible in the relatively near future, depending on “a lot of things.” He also observed that before any woman served as a surrogate for a cloned Neanderthal fetus, society would first have to accept human cloning.
I’ve got several more reads for you, in link dump fashion.
Stephanie Fairyington at The Atlantic: The Lonely Existence of Mel Feit, Men’s Rights Advocate
Lawyers, Guns & Money: Neoconfederate Judges Rule NLRB Recess Appointments Unconstitutional
Mia Fontaine at The Atlantic: America Has an Incest Problem
WaPo: Mitt Romney is back. But he never really left.
The Advocate: Law Professor Challenges Supreme Court’s Jurisdiction Over DOMA
Now it’s your turn. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads
Posted: January 25, 2013 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: abortion rights, Bobby "Crazy" Jindal, dung balls, dung beetles, Filibuster Reform, Mary Jo White, rape, Reid, Republicans, SEC, wimp 46 Comments
Good
Morning!
I really don’t intend this to be a post about Republican crazy but we’re going to start out with that subject. Let’s hope this post morphs into something else by the time I’m done.
Apparently it took a female Republican to come up with the most vicious way to punish women who had the audacity to get themselves raped.
Wednesday, state representative Cathrynn Brown of New Mexico introduced a bill whose sheer audacity makes Todd Akins look as harmless as an ill-informed teenager groping his way through puberty.
The proposed legislation, House Bill 206, would make it illegal for a woman to have an abortion after being raped because the fetus is evidence of the crime. A women who does choose to have an abortion would be charged with the third-degree felony of “tampering with evidence,” which carries up to a three year prison sentence in New Mexico.
As the bill states:
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.
In other words, Brown just said to rape victims: give birth to this baby or you’ll go to jail.
Crazy Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal says the “GOP is a populist party’ and is the party of the middle class. Whoa, something in that exorcism must be causing him to have some kind of flash back. Here’s Tiger Beat on the Potomac:
“We must quit ‘big,’” he said. “We are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes or big anything. We must not be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys … We are the party whose ideas will help the middle class, and help more folks join the middle class.”
He called repeatedly for a reorienting of the party’s focus from the Beltway to state capitols.
“We believe in planting the seeds of growth in the fertile soil of your economy, where you live, where you work, invest, and dream, not in the barren concrete of Washington,” he said. “If it’s worth doing, block grant it to the states. If it’s something you don’t trust the states to do, then maybe Washington shouldn’t do it at all. We believe solving problems closer to home should always be our first, not last, option.”
Well, he did explain one of the ways he’s made everything worse down here along with that call out to states being able to do what ever they want which sounds remarkably like returning reinstating Jim Crow and expanding Jane Crow.
The Louisiana governor suggested “re-thinking nearly every social program in Washington” in a speech to members of the Republican National Committee gathered here.
“If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers,” he said, according to a copy of the speech obtained in advance by POLITICO. “We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.”
I’ve been caught in one of his website hells as well as the result of his passion for getting rid of every service that a government more efficiently provides. Things have been replaced by endless phone trees and decidedly unhelpful websites. It ain’t pretty or compassionate. It’s more like being thrown into Somalia.
So, here’s a good time to talk about some interesting facts about Dung Beetles. This is from the National Geographic which should send out a crew to figure out if there’s any sign of intelligent life in Republican held state houses through out the country. Dung Beetles evidently have a keener sense of the right way to go than Republicans as they navigate via the Milky Way.
Talk about star power—a new study shows that dung beetles navigate via the Milky Way, the first known species to do so in the animal kingdom.
The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.
“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said
study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.
Speaking of moving balls of dung around, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has wimped out on Filibuster reform.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be. Here’s an explanation from Beltway Bob errrr Ezra Klein.
What will be reform
ed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).
But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.
“What the Republicans have done is turn the motion to proceed on its head,” he argued. “It was originally set up to allow somebody to take a look at a piece of legislation. What the Republicans have done is they simply don’t allow me to get on the bill. I want to go to it on a Monday, they make me file cloture, that takes till Tuesday. Then it takes two days for the cloture vote to ‘ripen,’ so now it’s Thursday, and even if I get 60 votes, they still have 30 hours to twiddle their thumbs, pick their nose, do whatever they want. So, I’m not on the bill by the weekend, and in reality, that means next Monday or Tuesday.”
But the deal Reid struck with McConnell doesn’t end the filibuster against the motion to proceed. Rather, it creates two new pathways for moving to a new bill. In one, the majority leader can, with the agreement of the minority leader and seven senators from each party, sidestep the filibuster when moving to a new bill. In the other, the majority leader can short-circuit the filibuster against moving to a new bill so long as he allows the minority party to offer two germane amendments. Note that in all cases, the minority can still filibuster the bill itself.
Mary Jo White has been appointed to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by President Barack Obama.
Currently the head of litigation at Debevoise & Plimpton, a private law firm, Ms White will add a female voice to Mr Obama’s second-term team, which is so far dominated by men. More importantly, the former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York has experience policing Wall Street, which fell under her jurisdiction. Mr Obama has slammed bankers for their role in the financial crisis and ensuing recession. The choice of Ms White seems to signal his resolve in getting tough with the banks.The appointment is not without controversy. Ms White has benefited from the revolving door between public service and private practice. In the aftermath of the crisis, financial firms sought the assistance of former regulators with strong ties to the government. In a scathing article on Bloomberg‘s website, Jonathan Weil notes that Ms White participated in the defence of many people and institutions at the heart of the financial collapse. In October 2008 she was cited in a critical report by the SEC’s inspector general for receiving “relevant information” that was not publicly available. Some will ask whether she is truly a poacher turned gamekeeper or simply setting herself up for another lucrative turn through the revolving door.Mr Obama, for one, is convinced he is getting the “tough-as-nails prosecutor”. By putting Ms White at the SEC, he has suggested that the agency’s priority is enforcement. But a bigger challenge may come from the sprawling Dodd-Frank legislation, and its many gaps and contradictions. Much of the next chairman’s time should be devoted to rethinking how America’s capital markets are structured, and deciding how that vision will be translated into the numerous rules the SEC is required to write under Dodd-Frank’s sloppy mandates. Ms White, in other words, has a big job ahead of her.
Well, today’s post sorta took an interesting turn didn’t it? It went from crazy Republicans to wimpy Democrats with one little mention of the only smart and honest shit pusher in between. Well, at least the pictures are fun to look at.
What’s on your blogging and reading list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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